A FULL PLATE

It is a good thing that Jo Soares is fat. Otherwise, there might not be enough of him to go around.

A cheap shot, you say. Perhaps. But consider this: At age 57, Soares is indisputably Brazil's reigning king of comedy, and the crown prince of almost everything else in the world of entertainment.

First there's the television show. On any given weeknight, 10 million Brazilians tune in to "Jo Soares, 11:30," which is the time it comes on the air. The show--part Leno, part Koppel, part Letterman--dominates its time slot: In Sao Paulo, South America's largest city, 65 percent of upper-class households tune in.

On weekends, he packs them in at halls around Brazil for his one-man show, "A Fat Man in Concert." He once sold out a 4,000-seat arena for 25 straight performances. You do the math.

Each week, he writes a humor column based on current events for Veja, the Brazilian equivalent of Time magazine.

But he still had a little spare time, so he wrote a novel: "Xango of Baker Street," a Sherlock Holmes mystery set in 1880s Brazil. Since its release in October, it has sold more than 250,000 copies in a country where a book that sells 25,000 is a smash.

With a few days free, he played a small role in "Saturday," one of the most popular Brazilian movies of 1995.

What entertainment medium doesn't he dominate? Well, perhaps music and radio--but then you remember that he hosts a weekly jazz show and plays three instruments. He's also an accomplished amateur painter.

Yet he is not worried about spreading himself too thin.

"I think it's largely a question of choosing what you want to do," he says, leaning back behind his desk in his Sao Paulo penthouse and lighting up an enormous Havana cigar. "If you like what you are doing, you find time. If you don't, it's more difficult."

It is hard to overestimate his influence. Catch phrases he has coined during his nearly 30 years on the air remain in the Brazilian lexicon. And in a country where more than 20 million people are illiterate, Soares is as much an opinion maker as he is an entertainer.

In 1992, as the Brazilian congress investigated corruption charges against President Fernando Collor, Soares brought witnesses and politicians onto his show night after night. Ultimately, the president's brother, Pedro, came on and as millions watched, told the nation, "Fernando is a crook."

For hundreds of thousands of people, it was the first time they had heard the charges stated so bluntly. Collor eventually was impeached and resigned in disgrace.

Soares has interviewed homeless people and Mikhail Gorbachev, though not at the same time. A typical show could feature the president of Uruguay, an AIDS researcher, a worm exporter or Jerry Lee Lewis, Jean-Claude Van Damme or Chicago's Buddy Guy, all of whom have appeared on the show.

"It's a very democratic way of doing the show, because on the same show you might see a guy who shines shoes and a secretary of state," Soares says.

The format is similar to most American late-night shows: A comical host, an adoring audience and a band providing comic relief and background music. Like David Letterman, Soares isn't afraid to do a stupid human trick: He once tussled with a woman wrestler in a vat of Jell-O.

If his guests don't speak Portuguese, no problem--Soares, who is fluent in English, Spanish, Italian and French and has a smattering of German, translates for them.

Man of many faces

Soares first came to prominence as a comedy writer and TV performer in the 1960s. He later had a prime-time show on Brazil's TV Globo network called "Long Live the Fat Man," which was seen by as many as 70 million people.

Over the years, he developed a stable of more than 200 characters, though they're a bit more outrageous than Johnny Carson's Carnac the Magnificent. For example, there's "Captain Gay," a crusading superhero clad in pink tights, a rhinestone mask and a tiara.

But he chafed under the conservative restrictions of Globo's management. In 1988, he jumped to the smaller SBT network for a salary that he describes as "one of the highest" in Brazilian television.

Since then, he has helped make SBT a solid No. 2 to Globo, which is the world's largest network outside the United States. Globo officials reportedly call him "the whale that got away."

The only commercial failure of his career was the 1975 film "The Father of the People," which he wrote, directed and starred in. Critics loved it, but it flopped at the box office.

An unabashed hedonist who extols the virtues of ice cream, chocolate, bacon cheeseburgers and greasy deli sandwiches with lots of mayonnaise, Soares usually appears nattily dressed in a double-breasted blazer, custom-made jeans and his trademark bow tie, which he says he likes because he can't spill anything on it.

He stands about 5 foot 6 and weighs well over 200 pounds--a physique that provides fodder for much of his humor. He laughs at himself as much as anything else.

"I don't know who said it, but I think this is a brilliant sentence: `Angels fly because they take themselves lightly.' So I think I try especially hard, since I am fat," he says.

On stage, he is more risque and scatological than he can be on TV. During one recent performance, he reminisced about Collor's early days in office, when the president mesmerized the nation with such stunts as flying in fighter planes and jet-skiing.

"We thought we had a Superman," he mused. "Look, up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a piece of crap!"

And he's fond of splitting his audience in half, making one side shout "bun" and the other reply "da"--the equivalent in Portuguese of having a crowd shout the word "butt."

That routine once got him summoned to the federal capital during Brazil's 1964-1985 military dictatorship. "There was the wife of a colonel in the audience," he says with a shrug. "She didn't like it, and I had to go to Brasilia. It was terrible to work like that. You never knew what you could or couldn't do."

Another time, he recalls, he was summoned by the Brazilian secret police after he helped lead a protest against the imprisonment of nine intellectuals and actors.

"I spent the whole day there, and you never know if you're going to have to stay or if you're going to get out. Fortunately, I got out.

"But they asked me why I was there. I said I had been protesting against the imprisonment of these people, of the intellectuals and the artists. And the guy said to me, `You know that the word intellectual is a word that was created by the communists.'

"And I said, `I never knew that.' "

Today, after a decade of democracy, things are better. The current president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, is Soares' neighbor and friend. But that doesn't stop Soares: "Whenever there's the possibility about making a joke about the government, I always do, even in front of him."

Slow down? Not a chance

Though he claims to love his frenetic lifestyle, he takes off from December to March and travels, frequently to New York, where he rents an apartment and stocks up on books. The walls of his home are lined with volumes in Portuguese, Spanish and English, ranging from Hemingway and Kafka to mysteries, thrillers and books on wine.

Yet while he's gone, he misses the spotlight.

"When I am traveling, the thing I miss the most is people passing by and saying hello and smiling at me," he says. "I walk in the streets of New York and nobody smiles at me. I think, `What did I do wrong? They don't like me anymore.' "

Now he is researching a second novel, which spans the years 1914 to 1954. And he is looking forward to going back to work.

"Sometimes, I think, `If I inherited a very big fortune and was one of the richest men in the world, what would I do?' " he says.

"Well, I would do only my TV show, and maybe the theater. And maybe I would write a book. The same things I do now."